James Gunn has been fired from the position of director of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise after a series of the offensive of director surfaced. The 51-year-old film-maker had been behind the first two Marvel hits and was working on the script for the third. Tweets of his from 2008 and 2009 were discovered by the conservative site the Daily Caller that made light of rape, pedophilia, 9/11 and the Holocaust. Gunn has been vocal in his criticism of Donald Trump, tweeting last year that the US is in a national crisis with an incompetent president.

Alan Horn, the Walt Disney studios chairman, said in a statement that the offensive attitudes and statements discovered on James’ Twitter feed are indefensible and inconsistent with Disney studio’s values and he company have severed the company ’s business relationship with him.

As the story brewed, Gunn initially tweeted an apology for outrageous and taboo jokes. He later released a longer statement, taking “full responsibility” for his actions. In 2011, Gunn had apologized in a statement to Glaad for a number of blog posts that contained crude jokes about gay comic-book characters. Gunn’s credits also include the 2006 horror Slither and he was set to reboot a new series of Starsky & Hutch. The Guardians franchise has made over $1.6bn worldwide to date and the third was expected to be released in 2020.